Environmental protection laws at all levels of government are concerned with contaminated medical wastes. In most jurisdictions of the civilized world such wastes can no longer be put in the conventional channels of waste disposal. Nor can much of such wastes be reliably rendered safe in a practical, discernible way at the point of use. On-site sterilization, for example, of many medical implements is giving way to the use of disposable implements because sterilization is labor-intensive, subject to human error and all but impossible to verify. Used hypodermic syringes are possibly the most dreaded waste of all because they are inherently contaminated and dangerous to handle; they resist decay and can float on an ocean until a shore is found. And they are sought by the illicit drug trade.
Until recently medical facilities were required to shear off the needle part from the syringe body immediately after the injection, but this procedure was found to spread disease by means of the air-borne aerosols generated by the mechanical shearing action. Also, the sharp, contaminated needle tip remained to be handled and disposed of. Current regulations call for dropping the contaminated syringe with needle intact into a safe container, called a "sharps" box, for custom delivery to an authorized repository.
A state of the art device destroys the needle at the point of use by passing a large current at low voltage through the needle to reduce it and all attendant contaminants to a minute, sterile, incinerated residue. That invention protects the nearby medical personnel and the environment but it cannot cope with scalpels, glass or the left over hollow barrels of the syringes. Thus the medical facility, while performing a useful service to itself and society, is left with its other contaminated "sharps" and syringe bodies to ship to a safe repository. For its otherwise good efforts it has saved neither time nor cost. There is also in the prior art a technique for rendering sharp items less dangerous by potting in resin such as epoxy using a hardener. Encapsulated spores can, however, survive for years and the system is regarded as unsafe for lack of sterilization.
The present ground rules for dealing with medical instrument wastes not destroyable safely on the site call for: (1) minimum handling at the point of use, that is the person performing the injection, for example, is expected to drop the used syringe directly into the "sharps" box; (2) containerizing the waste by means of a sealed "sharps" box marked "hazardous", and (3) logging and shipping the containerized, contaminated waste to a special repository under an umbrella of costly manifests which must circulate among the facility, the hauler and the repository and then kept available for audit for several years. The expense to society is enormous and the beaches of the world reveal the flaws in the system.
The present invention is a fresh attempt to solve the problems. Its objects and features are:
to provide a relatively inexpensive container to receive the medical instrument waste at the point of use,
to provide a way to sterilize inexpensively the contaminated contents within the container while still at the medical facility,
to render the syringe bodies in the container not only unusable but unidentifiable,
to render the needles, the scalpels and the glass harmless against cutting or piercing personnel and to render them unrecoverable by any practical means,
to provide a containerized sterilizing system which is reliable and virtually immune to human error,
to provide a containerized sterilizing system which clearly indicates even to the casual observer whether the contents have been rendered harmless and safe,
to provide a containerized medical implement waste disposal system in which neither the treated container nor its contents can float,
to provide a reliable, relatively inexpensive method and apparatus to treat contaminated medical implement wastes at the point of use in a manner which renders them capable of being thrown out in the ordinary channels of waste disposal, and
to provide a containerized sterilizing system for medical implement waste which if desired lends itself to recycling.